Stanford Hospital: 20000 Patient Records Exposed Due To Privacy Lapse

The ongoing furor over fake SSL certificates continued to dominate security headlines, while increasing SpyEye botnet activity and leaked patient health information also drew attention the week of Sept. 5. The week's biggest data breach news had nothing to do with Anonymous or any other online group. Instead, Stanford University's hospital confirmed that a spreadsheet containing 20,000 patient records had been posted onto a commercial Website.

In this incident, an employee of a third-party service provider to the hospital posted the entire patient information spreadsheet to a Website in search of help on creating bar graphs. This is a remarkable, yet telling example of what can go wrong if employees are not trained to be privacy conscious.

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